Nothing in particular baffles me. I can get through the material pretty fine. It's just that I prefer starting from a solid and thorough grasp of all the fundamentals and working on up from there, rather than jumping head-first into the middle of a subject and then working backwards to fill in any gaps as needed. I also prefer understanding why things work rather than just knowing that they do.
I understand what you mean here, but in programming, it sometimes makes sense to do things this way. For example, in my introduction to programming course, I used Dictionaries/Hashes to write some programs. Key-value pairs are important for writing certain types of simple programs, but I didn't really understand how they worked. Almost a year later, I took an algorithms course and learned about hash functions and hash maps and finally understood how they worked. It wouldn't have made sense to refrain from using this tool until I'd learned how to implement them and it was really rewarding to finally understand it.
I always like to learn things from the ground up too, but this way just works sometimes in programming.
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